Innocent wife and mom spends 5 days in jail

A Colorado wife and mother with no criminal record has spent five days in jail because a police detective identified her as a suspect in a robbery, even though her name was different, she was seven years older than the suspect, and weighed 90 pounds more.

The report comes from Susan Greene, a columnist for the Denver Post, who told how Christina FourHorn, note the spelling of the name, was at home in Sterling taking a shower when three cops knocked on her door.

“The wife and mom with no criminal record got hauled off to jail for five days for attacking and robbing a man she never met,” Greene wrote.

“You hear stories like this, and you think it could never happen to you,” FourHorn told the columnist.

It was in 2006 when a Denver man told police his girlfriend, Christin Fourhorn (no “a” and lowercase “h”), with whom he’d been living, attacked him.

The suspect was described as 26, 160 pounds, had lived in Oklahoma, and had a tattoo on her left arm.

“Detective Mark Dalvit searched Colorado’s motor vehicle database and came across Christina FourHorn,” Greene wrote. “He then reported that the victim identified her — using her name and date of birth — as the
‘girlfriend/suspect’ who attacked him. That false information was used to secure an arrest warrant.”

The columnist wrote that differences like the name spellings, age, weight and background were ignored.

“Instead, last March, police arrested FourHorn, who is married, in front of her neighbors, held her for three nights in Logan County Jail, then drove her in shackles to Denver,” Greene said.

Her explanation that she was at home, that she worked nights and couldn’t have been living a double life, weren’t heeded.

“Nobody would hear me,” she reported.

She was charged and had to bond out with money her husband borrowed. Eventually, without notifying her, the district attorney’s office dropped charges.

“By the time she learned her name was cleared, she had missed more than two weeks of work and was a day away from losing her job,” Green wrote.

FourHorn, capital “H” and “a”, called it “one gigantic nightmare.”

Denver authorities told the columnist the city’s “investigative procedures” had been followed in the case.